I just finished pulling up a swath of sod in front of our house and filling it with top soil. I still need to plant seeds in the bed (a bunch of wildflowers) but after two hours of hauling stuff around in the wheel barrow - accompanied by my own private cloud of mosquitos - I'm totally worn out and the seeds can wait until tomorrow. Here are my pictures from last week (well ... except Monday).



Somehow I didn't take a picture on Monday. I'm not quite sure how it happened because I remember thinking about taking pictures quite a lot but I must not have gotten my camera out of my bag. I didn't notice until sometime on Tuesday.


This is my favourite thing to see in our mailbox. It means there is a parcel for us in one of the larger boxes. It works like this: the mail person leaves the key in your box, you use it to open the big box and then drop it in the letter slot to give it back. My sock club package was in the big box.


This is my iron about eight o'clock at night. It's on so I must have been sewing or ironing or something. The light in my sewing room gets very soft and hazy in the evening. The red light seems particularly bright.


This is my reamer. I love it. I made Key Lime pie only once before I bought it and it took two of us ages to juice all those tiny limes by hand. This little guy completely revolutionized the process and I like to make key lime pie as frequently as I think I can convince other people to help me eat it. This particular pie was shared with my sister and her husband.


Gratuitous crab-apple blossom picture. I love flowering trees.


Coddled eggs are really good. They're a lot like boiled eggs but you get to add stuff before cooking. I haven't made one in ages and had to look up the recipe.

We got a bunch of rain yesterday and my garden is happy. I realized that, though I've shared some pictures of things growing, I haven't really shared my garden here yet. It's almost all new this year. Last year I had two half-barrels of carrots and two very scraggly looking tomato plants that didn't really do much. This year, with a lot of help from my dad, I have four big boxes in the backyard, the two half-barrels of carrots on the front deck and two more half-barrels of tomatoes on the back deck where they seem to be much happier.


The boxes are three by three feet and about two feet apart. They are roughly knee height and very easy to work in. We can see them past our deck out the back windows off the family room and see how our veggies are doing. I'm planning to built a trellis for the peas with some of the willows growing at the back of our yard.


Things have been planted, or transplanted, as containers were ready and most things have sprouted now. The last box was planted on Friday and has an empty square for a second planting of spinach in a couple of weeks. Some of the sprouts surprised me; I didn't expect the beet sprouts to be dark purple, or the bean sprouts to still have their beans on - like some sort of beetle with its wings open - or the peas to be full of leaves right from the start.


The whole garden's not veggies though. We've got our ornamental crab-apple blooming away in the front yard. I think the blooms have reached their peak but I'm hoping they'll still look nice for my tea party next weekend. Under the tree is a tiny flower garden: I've got Argyranthemum (pink) and Bidens (yellow) for some height, Lobelia (blues, purples and white) to spread around and fill in, and Pansies for some bright spots of colour.


I have plans to make another flower bed against the front of the house. I may even get to that this evening. I'm not quite sure what shape to cut the bed yet; my sister says it should be something kind of rounded to look nice. I'm planning to fill it with a bunch of wildflower seeds and some sunflowers to add some more colour to the front of the house.

You can see some more pictures in my Flickr set.

Guess what arrived in the mail Tuuesday night? If you're in the club and still waiting (and don't want the surprise to be spoiled) don't click the "Read More" button. If you're too anxious to wait or want to see something sublime, please click on.


Meet "Sweet Pea". Isn't she lovely. So subtle and quiet and so, so girly. How about another picture?


There are such delicate shades of green and yellow and pink in this yarn. I love it. Here's the mini skein - you can kind of see the colours mixing.


According to Tina's notes this yarn was inspired by a flurry of Blue Moon employees who are about to become grandmothers. For this reason the patterns also include child and even bootie sizes. Too cute. Inside my ball band it says "pookie" and others have a wide variety of other cute pet names for wee ones (buttercup, Sweet Cheeks, Princess etc.).


Both patterns this time around are for anklets and as soon as I saw them I knew I was going to be knitting the Swing Set socks. They're so simple and sweet. I don't know how I will wait until my needles are free to knit these. Sometime soon I'm going to buy a whole bunch of (matching*) 2.00 mm sock length double-pointed needles so I never have to wait to start a new pair of socks.**

*So when I break one I don't end up with a partial set.

**I'll also need to invest in a much larger Works-in-Progress basket.